31 July 2016

Vigan or Taal? I had a bit of a discussion about this with my former student and colleague Albert Gamatero over the weekend when I took him up on an invitation to take me on a walking tour of his hometown, Taal. Not that the question is of national significance; and ideally, if one has the time and can afford it, both heritage towns are excellent travel destinations.

28 July 2016

The Province of Batangas’ three cities had mixed fortunes even as the province itself soared from 20th to 9th among 74 provinces in the 2016 Annual National Competitiveness Index. The calculation of the index is an undertaking by the National Competitiveness Council of the Philippines in coordination with Regional Competitiveness Committees and USAID. The 2016 results were released last 14 July 2016.

24 July 2016

When I was a small boy back in the sixties, I had been hearing from my Mother, who was originally from the town of Nasugbu in western Batangas, and other relations on the maternal side about this place that they referred to as ‘landing.’ I knew, because I grew up in an Air Force base, that the term probably referred to a place where airplanes flew from or landed.

Mention has already been made in the second chapter of the Spaniard Miguel de Loarca as this narrative sought to get a bearing on the coastline of Tulay or Tuley. For this chapter, we return to his relation or narrative to get a better grasp of how things were in Batangas in the first decade of Spanish colonisation in terms of population and governance.

Most Filipinos, from high school history books, ought to have a fundamental knowledge of the so-called Galleon Trade, that maritime link across the vast expanse of the Pacific through which the Philippines maintained its contact with Nueva España (Mexico) and, therefore, the mother country Spain itself.

It was no surprise that Spanish overtures of peace and friendship with the King of Borney in 1573 were received lukewarmly; and even this is an understatement. The Spaniards, after all, were encroaching upon lands where Borney, if it did not have direct sovereignty, at least wielded apparent influence.

11 July 2016

This article examines the crime incidence in the CALABARZON Region, with particular interest on Batangas, of which this web site is about. The data used for this article has been taken from the statistics made available online by the Regional Office of the Philippine National Police (PRO-CALABARZON).

Documents of the earliest Hispanic contacts with Batangas referred to the natives of Bonbon and Balayan as Moros – Spanish for Moors. This was altogether incorrect because the term Moor was originally used to connote the Muslim inhabitants of North Africa and parts of Europe, particularly those of the Iberian Peninsula, regardless of ethnicity.

This is the follow-up article to the profiling of Batangas’ three cities. This time, I present to all readers a profiling of twenty-two municipalities of the province in terms of competitiveness. The information in this article comes from data collected for the Cities and Municipalities Competitiveness Index, an annual ranking made by the National Competitiveness Council through its regional arms.

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The three main characters of the initial Spanish exploration and subsequent conquest of Luzon – including Batangas – in 1570 did not even survive the decade. Miguel López de Legaspi, the first Hispanic governor of the country, lasted just over a year from the time he first arrived in Luzon in 1571 to claim it on behalf of Felipe II, the King of Spain.